You’re at the top of your game, running faster and jumping higher than ever before. You’ve been training hard and have been talking to prospective college coaches. You are ready to take your dream of being a collegiate athlete to the next and final phase. All those workouts, all those aches and pains will add up to this. There are only five minutes left in your last season’s game, and as you finish up your high school career with your dreams in plain sight, you watch your team from inside the training room, with your leg elevated, and the chill of the realization that you’re done with sports for the next few weeks, or months, or even more? Or is that just the chill of the ice surrounding your stiff joint?
Injury is an unpleasant and unfortunately common occurrence in athletics no matter what in the sport. The high demands of sprinting, jumping, kicking, throwing and more take a toll on muscles and joints. The twisting of a joint or the overstretching or tearing a muscle or ligament is extremely painful, can require surgery (which takes time for healing—time that the athlete is not working out and getting stronger), but can be prevented. Most athletes are aware of the fact that warming up and stretching properly are beneficial to injury prevention and the effectiveness of the athletes’ performance, but what they may not realize is that there are programs that can be incorporated into a normal workout that can actually strengthen and protect athletes as well. This blog is meant to give insight to a proper, focused warm up, and some key “prehab” techniques that can and will help athletes if they take the time to do them.
Warming up before working out is usually the time athletes take to go through the motions and appease their coaches and catch up with their teammates before getting into the workout. It usually consists of jogging a lap slowly and standing with their legs spread wider than shoulder length while the kids laugh and sway and catch up on last night’s tv shows or sport center highlights. I know, because as a dual collegiate athlete myself, that’s what I did. Whenever the coach glanced toward us, I’d bend down a little to appear to be “preparing” for our session.
After numerous injuries and taking classes like anatomy and physiology and kinesiology, I learned the importance of a good warm up in preventing those injuries I faced. Warming up is important because it raises the temperature of the body by pumping blood. Therefore, an athlete should break a sweat in their warm up. Once the body temperature is up, the muscles have enough blood flowing in them to loosen up to optimal performance lengths. To further optimize that, and slowly prepare muscles for activity, dynamic stretching should be used.
Static stretching is standing around in a circle holding a stretch for a count of 10, and is pretty ineffective, especially since the athletes probably aren’t even really paying attention to the stretches. Dynamic stretching is much better for pre-activity because it involves some focus; keeps the body moving, blood pumping, and temperature raised; it lengthens muscles that are sport specific by maximizing the range of motion; and studies show that it prepares your neuromuscular system as well, which means that your muscles will be able to contract harder, making you stronger. Examples of good dynamic stretches can be leg swings, hopping, skipping for height, arm swings, high knees, walking quad stretches—and anything else that involves movement and stretches the muscles.
Look for part two for more active ways to prevent injury.
